Fairfield Substitute Teacher Accused Of Choking Young Students

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FAIRFIELD (CBS13) – A Fairfield substitute teacher is accused of choking his young students. Now he’s out on bail but also out of a job.

That substitute teacher was working at David A. Weir Elementary in a second-grade classroom, and a parent of one of the alleged victims hopes to never see him again.

“I was very upset,” Elizabeth Keller Zimmerman said. “I was first in disbelief.”

She was shocked after what her 6-year-old daughter Sophia came home and told her.

“She and three other boys had been choked, had been grabbed on the throat, not on the back of the neck, but the throat,” she said.

Elizabeth immediately called Weir Elementary and would eventually find out her daughter wasn’t the only one telling that story.

“It appeared that the teacher probably had some inappropriate contact in the way he was trying to discipline the students,” Fairfield Police Lt. Greg Hurlbut said.

In fact after an investigation, police would place substitute teacher Joe Yow in custody for child abuse. Elizabeth said the abuse wasn’t just physical

“She told me that he called her the B word,” she said. “They don’t deserve that. They don’t deserve to be exposed that at all.”

Yow is out on bail and we stopped by his Suisun City home on Monday but there was no answer. The school district said Yow was immediately removed from its substitute roster. The district said he’s been subbing there for less than a year.

But Elizabeth hopes it goes further.

“I hope he never teaches again, to be perfectly honest with you,” she said.